Tech Thought

Tech tips, hints, and general musings. PHP, Perl, Mysql, Javascript, AJAX, JSON, Linux, Mac OSX

Entries for the ‘Development’ Category

Online Tool to Convert .ICS file to Excel/CSV

I couldn’t find a decent way online to convert ICS files into an Excel type format for easy manipulation, or adding to documents etc.  So I’ve built a simple one that is now available online:
http://csv2sql.evandavey.com/ical2csv.php
This takes an iCal URL and provides you with a CSV file as a download.  Makes it much easier to get [...]

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How To: PHP OAuth Twitter

So, you’re building a web based twitter client in PHP.  Easy, just use a simple Twitter API client and call the Twitter API directly.  But what if you don’t want to store the user’s Twitter authentication information anywhere?  It’s a security risk anyway and some people don’t want to give up their account details to a [...]

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How-To: Create my.cnf file in MAMP

This is a simple process, however not something I could find documented anywhere easy to find. MAMP supplies you with a range of sample configuration files:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql/my-huge.cnf
/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql/my-innodb-heavy-4G.cnf
/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql/my-large.cnf
/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf
/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql/my-small.cnf

To setup one of these for MAMP, simply issue the following command:

sudo cp /Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql/my-choicehere.cnf /Applications/MAMP/Library/my.cnf

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What does iPhone OS 3.0 Mean for your Apps?

Recently I was involved in a podcast regarding the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade. We looked at all the new features (and some upcoming ones in v3.1) and discussed how they relate to new features clients can develop in their apps.
You can hear more here:
What does iPhone OS 3.0 Mean for Your Apps [...]

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Google Maps: Zoom Level, Center from points on map

So you’ve created a pretty Google Map on your website.  You place a whole heap of markers on your map, driven from data you’ve got stored in your database.
A nice thing to do when we first show the map, would be to ensure that all the markers are visible on the map.
To [...]

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yum fails: Fixing Fedora Core 5 yum repositories

Fedora Core 5 is currently EOL – it’s not supported any more.  As a result, you might find you can’t use yum to install packages any more – you get an error message about this file not existing:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/repodata/repomd.xml
This is because the repositories that yum uses aren’t there anymore.  However you can modify the repositories in [...]

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How-To Fix: MAMP won’t start

Okay, so sometimes our shiny friend and development support buddy MAMP won’t start properly.  I’ve found this often happens when you’ve first booted up your Mac and you try to start getting stuck into your code.
Symptoms are pretty simple to diagnose – you start MAMP, and it’s control panel pops up and shows that everything is [...]

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How-To: Move change the address of a SVN repository

So you’ve changed where you host your subversion repository for a particular project and you want to update your local copy so that it points at the correct address?   How do you do this?  Simple:
svn switch –relocate http://oldserver.com/PROJECT 

http://newserver.com/PROJECT
This will recursively modify all the .svn folders contents so they point to the correct location.

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How-To: Solve ‘modifying layer that is being finalized’ iPhone SDK

Okay, so I’ve been getting the ‘modifying layer that is being finalized’ error message when i’m trying to release a subview from a superview:
[self.popupPreviewView release];
self.popupPreviewView = nil;
The best way to solve this (that I’ve found – please post a comment if you can provide a better one) is to remove the view from it’s superview [...]

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iPhone App Icon Doesn’t appear on iPhone, works in Simulator

If your iPhone App icon isn’t appearing on your phone, but works fine on the simulator, it may be a problem with the way you’ve saved your Icon.png file:

I had this problem, until I chose to “show” the extension of the Icon.png file when I saved it from within Preview.  Once I’d done this, re-saved [...]

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How-To: Make UIWebView transparent

Common problem, need to apply nice HTML formatting for a section of your page, but want the UIWebView not to appear as a big white box – only the content of the UIWebView to appear. How to do it?
myWebView.opaque = NO;
myWebView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
[myWebView loadHTMLString:
@"<html><body style='background-color: transparent'>
Content [...]

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Objective-C: Calculating Days, Minutes, Hours from seconds

If you need to convert a total number of seconds into specific components (days, hours, minutes and seconds) in Objective-C, you can use this code snippet.  You can probably do this a million other ways, but this works beautifully for me:
    NSNumber *valueForDisplay = [NSNumber numberWithDouble:
[...]

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How-To: Show/sync volume control in iPhone SDK

Developing for the iPhone, we wanted to show a volume control that sync’ed with the user’s volume control buttons on the side of the phone.  It turns out, the best way to do this is to show the volume control using the MPVolumeView class (part of the MediaPlayer framework).
Here is some example code from our [...]

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How-To: Fix ‘Verification Failed’ error (0xe8000001) iPhone Adhoc Distribution

I have had huge problems trying to provide my iPhone Applications to friends using the Adhoc Distribution method.  I thought I was following Apple’s instructions down to the letter:

Obtain an Adhoc Distribution Provisioning Profile
Install provisioning profile in XCode
For my project, create a new build profile called “Adhoc Distribution” copied from the “Release” build setting
Set the code [...]

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How-To: Convert a string to NSDate

In Objective-C, you commonly nead to convert a string to an NSDate object.  A simple way to do this is using the NSDateFormatter object.  It provides the dateFromString method which converts a string into an NSDate object.  You do, however, need to tell NSDateFormatter the format the date will be in.  See below example:
NSDateFormatter *df [...]

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UIScrollView not working – scrolling doesn’t work

Okay, so I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to work out why my UIScrollView won’t scroll! The secret, I’ve found, is the following:
- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];

    // Setup scroll view
    [scrollView
setContentSize:CGSizeMake(backgroundImage.frame.size.width,
[...]

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iPhone Development: How to Stream Audio (mp3)

Okay, so we’ve fully taken the plunge and are now developing for the iPhone platform.  Its got a fantastic SDK, with lots of really nice features and tools to help you with your developing fun.  However some tasks are a little more difficult than you’d image.
For instance, we wanted to stream an MP3 file with [...]

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How-To: Redirect to different URL using Javascript or META tags

If you need to redirect from one page to another, you can achieve this with either a META tag redirection or Javascript.  See below for an example.  You should provide a manual link as not all browsers support META tags – and javascript won’t work if its been disabled:
<html>
<head>
<title>Move my domain!</title>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”url=http://www.newdomain.com”>
<script language=”JavaScript”>
function Redirect()
{
window.location [...]

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WSP Offers Australian Based iPhone Application Development

WSP Online Solutions, a division of WSP Environmental, today launched its Australian based iPhone development services.  iPhone application development is somewhat of a niche market, given that Objective-C (the language used to development native iPhone applications) is not commonly used outside of the Mac community.  As a result, the Australian based iPhone development community is [...]

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How-To: Create a mysql friendly date with php

This is really simple – and quite useful if you are trying to insert a date into mysql and you can’t use the “now()” mysql command (due to say a timezone difference):
$date = date(“Y-m-d G:i:s”);

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